Starfishers Volume 3: Stars End by Glen Cook Read Free Book Online

time I was on Old Earth. The last time I visited by mother. She wanted out. Her friends wouldn’t let her go. I arranged it for her. And ended up sponsoring her.”
    “Sort of like being a foster parent,” Mouse explained.
    “Guess she’d be eighteen now. I haven’t thought about her in ages. You shouldn’t have mentioned her, Mouse. Now you’ve got me worried.”
    “Hey, don’t. Max will look out for her.”
    “Maybe. But that’s not right, putting it on somebody else. Is there any way I could send her a letter now and then, Amy? Just to let her know I’m all right and thinking about her? I’d let you or Jarl write it if you wanted. You could even run it through the crypto computer to make sure it’s innocent.”
    “This’s just a kid?” Amy demanded.
    “Yeah. She reminded me a lot of me when I came off Old Earth. Awful lost. I thought I could help out by sponsoring her. And then I kind of ran out when the Bureau sent us out here. I told her we’d be back in a couple of months. It’s been almost fourteen.”
    “I’ll ask Jarl. He lets a little mail go out. Some of us have relatives outside. But it’s slow.”
    “That doesn’t matter. Amy, you’re a jewel. I love you.”
    “Well, if you’re going to get mushy,” Mouse said, standing. “I’ve got to run. A citizenship class. It’s from hunger, Moyshe. Me and Emily Hopkins and this fascist bastard of a teacher . . . Maybe I’ll hurt the arm again. Get back in here so I can miss a few too. Behave. Do what the doctor lady says. Or I’ll wring your neck.” He made his exit before Moyshe could embarrass him with many thanks-for-comings.
    “You’re awful quiet today, honey,” benRabi said after a while. Perhaps if the doctor had not been there . . . 
    “I’m just tired. We’re still doing double shifts and barely keeping our heads above water. We’re going to be in the Yards a long time. Assuming Danion doesn’t fall apart before we get there. Assuming the sharks don’t knock us apart.”
    “You’ve mentioned these Yards about fifty times and wouldn’t tell me about them. Do you trust me enough now?”
    “They’re what the name sounds like. Where we build and fix our ships. Moyshe, you’re not going anywhere for a while. Tell me about you.”
    “What?”
    “I met you the very first day. Way back on Carson’s, when you signed your contract. We lived together for months before I even found out you’ve got a daughter. I don’t know anything about you.”
    “Greta isn’t my daughter, honey. I just helped a kid who needed somebody . . . ”
    “It’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?”
    “Legally, I guess. On paper. They’d have trouble making it stand up in court.”
    “Tell me. Everything.”
    There was little else to do but talk. He talked.
    The doctor, lurking in the background watching suspiciously, had made it clear that he would be stuck here for a while.
    “All right. Let me know when it gets boring.”
    He had been born in North America on Old Earth, to Clarence Hardaway and Myra McClennon. He had hardly known his father. His mother, for reasons he still did not understand, had elected to raise him at home instead of burying him in the State Creche. Only a few Social Insurees raised their children.
    His early years had been typical for home-raised S.I. children. Little supervision, little love, little education. He had been running with a kid gang before he was eight.
    He had been trine when he had seen his first offworlders. Spikes, they had called them. These had been Navy men in crisp dress blacks diligently pursuing the arcane business of offworlders.
    Those uniforms had captured his imagination. They had become an obsession. He had started keying information out of his mother’s home data retrieval terminal. He had not had the education to decipher most of it. He had started teaching himself, building from the ground up toward the things he so desperately wanted to know.
    At ten he had quit the